Soccer Betting Tips, Evolution of Predictions and the First Poisson Method

Betting tips help you predict the correct outcome of the football match to place a bet. The most popular tips are statistical predictions. The Poisson method is the oldest prediction method and the best known in the literature.

This article summarizes the Poisson method for soccer prediction, its advantages and disadvantages.

Statistical soccer prediction methods began to appear mostly in the early 1990s, but the first (and so far the most famous) method was published by Moroney in 1956. According to this method, the results of matches football can be successfully modeled as random observations drawn from Poisson. Probability distribution. Suppose that x and y represent the number of goals scored by the home and away teams respectively. Thus, according to the Poisson method, x and y are random variables, each of which comes from its own independent Poisson distribution. The Poisson distribution function is different for each team.

The function has its own parameters (ie in the Poisson case), which define the expected number of goals scored by the opponents. Once the distribution function parameters are correctly estimated, the match outcome can be successfully predicted. It is clear that when empirically estimated, the parameters of any function include some error due to the limited number of observations. Thus, football match predictions are often incorrect. This estimation error defines the confidence intervals assigned to the predicted number of goals.

The main advantage of the Poisson model is its ability to predict the expected number of goals. It is maintained for almost all soccer tournaments. Also, the estimate of the mean of the Poisson distribution is usually based on all historical games played during a specific tournament, making the estimate reliable.

However, this method has many disadvantages. Predict the scores of each team independently, without taking into account the strength of the opposing team; It does not distinguish between the attacking and defending abilities of the teams and does not consider the changes of these abilities that depend on time; Furthermore, it does not refer to the influence of home advantage on the final score.

All those drawbacks gave rise to new developments based on this method. Newer methods distinguish between the attacking and defending strengths of teams, consider the strength of the opposing team, and take into account home field advantage. We will discuss these developments in our upcoming articles on the evolution of soccer statistical predictions.